


Phantoms

by JustAnotherUnderstudy



Series: Grief is the Price We Pay for Love [5]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Not A Fix-It, Soul Bond, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:14:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18493996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherUnderstudy/pseuds/JustAnotherUnderstudy
Summary: James feels the pain. It's all in his head. But that doesn't make it less painful.





	Phantoms

**Author's Note:**

> Not the most depressing thing I ever wrote.

There's a pain his his hip. He's seen medical about it. X-rays and CT scans have come back negative. It's in his head, he thinks. And he tries to deal with it the best he can.

When he was working, the pain came and went. It started during his first meeting with the new M. He'd been fine, until he walked into the office and saw Mallory sitting behind that desk. He ignored it then.

It bothered him for a little while, then it went away. He could identify the moment it went away, in fact. It went away when he saw her face on his television screen after he inserted the DVD that had shown up in his mail box.

He didn't feel it again for months. He thought it had just been part of his recovery from Turkey and from chasing down Silva and from Skyfall.

Within days of driving away from MI6 for good, he began to feel it again.

Madeleine was a psychiatrist so he mentioned it to her after the doctors could come up with nothing. But she had no answers. Phantom pains usually came from amputations.

"What does it feel like?" she asked.

"Like I was shot there," he told her.

He had places on his body to compare that to.

"Have you ever had other phantom pains?" 

He could only think of one other time.

"When I was around six, I had horrible abdominal pains," he told her. "It felt like my body was being ripped apart.

"When my parents got me to hospital, the doctors could find no reason for it," he said. "But they did exploratory surgery and took my appendix just in case."

* * *

It took Olivia some time to figure out what all the pains were, decades, in fact.

They had started with a headache to end all headaches, which was quickly followed by the feeling that her entire body was being crushed. She'd been glad she wasn't working. She had curled up on the sofa and cried. And, as quickly as the onset came, it was gone.

She never felt it again.

When her daughter was three, there had been another incident. Her arm ached suddenly, as if it had been broken. That had lasted longer, and then had come and gone for days. She'd treated it with aspirin and tried to ignore it.

There wasn't another notable incident for many more years.

The next came when she was sitting in her office one evening. She felt a little lightheaded and warm, as if she might be getting a fever. She hadn't time to think too much about it because Villiers burst in with news that Bond was in distress. That had superseded anything she might have been concerned about a moment earlier.

Later, after Vesper had saved James, and things had settled down in the office, she realized the feelings she had earlier were gone. She thought that the adrenaline rush had cured whatever she might have been coming down with and forgot the incident.

It was only days later, during their frantic search for Bond, that she had yet another, far more severe pain. This time she couldn't ignore it. Fortunately, Tanner had returned from his leave and she lay on the sofa in her office and had him relay information to her while no one else was allowed to see her. This pain lasted hours and came in sharp bursts. The worst part was its location. She couldn't explain to Tanner that she was feeling sharp pains across her groin. Finally, it began to ebb, but Olivia still found it painful to sit for weeks.

It was due to this pain that she did not travel to see James when they found him. She felt guilty but she couldn't afford to be in the air and have another incident like it. 

That time she had gone to medical to see what might have happened. She had thought it odd because she had never been one to have any sort of female problems. Even menopause hadn't affected her as it did many of her friends. But they had found nothing. And everyone, Olivia included, chocked it up to stress.

For years after that, there were little things. Nothing that was quite as immobilizing, however. So, Olivia went on and tried not to think about the occasional pangs around her body and her face.

It was during Bond's pursuit of the hard drive, that Olivia finally put it all together. The pain that blossomed in her chest was what she suspected being shot felt like. As she turned and looked out the window after Bond had been shot into the river, there was another, separate chest pain, and, more, she had to force herself to take deep breaths because it felt as if her lungs were filling with water.

That night she sat at her desk, the pain in her chest still vivid and the burning of her lungs still sharp, and she knew Bond was alive. 

She looked into his file for other incidents to see if they coincided with her earlier pains. Bond had indeed broken his arm when her daughter was three. He'd also had his appendix out on the day her daughter was born, as a precautionary measure. The medical record showed that he'd presented with severe, unexplained abdominal pain. James had told the doctor it felt as if his whole body was being torn apart. Olivia found that an apt description of childbirth.

His birth might have coincided with that odd headache back in the sixties, but she couldn't be one-hundred-percent sure. 

She laughed at that. At this point, she could indeed be sure that it had coincided with James' birth.

After she and Mallory faked her death, there was only one more incident, which she was never sure was related to James. Shortly before someone demolished her old building, she'd had a terrible pain in her head. But after that, nothing more. She eventually learned from M that James had retired. And she realized that, aside from the pangs James felt as a result of his previous injuries, there likely would be no more phantom pains for her.

She did wonder if James could still feel the pain in her hip the same as she felt his pains. It wasn't important, she realized. He didn't know she was alive, so if he did feel it, he'd never know where it came from.

* * *

James didn't figure it out until several years later. The pain had simply become a constant companion, along with the other parts of his body that hurt from all the damage inflicted on it. 

Then, one evening, he began to feel everything very intensely, especially the pain in his hip. He told Madeleine he wasn't feeling well, then took some pain medicine and went to bed. 

He slept longer than he ever had that night. In fact, Madeleine was frantic when she finally got him to wake.

"God, James," she said, nearly in tears. "I was about to call an ambulance."

He gave her a confused look.

"I've been trying to rouse you for ten minutes," she said.

His head felt odd, and as he thought about the feeling he realized it was as if a memory was missing. He quizzed Madeleine and then asked her to do the same, but he seemed to have all his memory in tact that they could think of. Still, he continued to feel that he had forgotten something terribly important. 

Due to this feeling, it took several days to notice that the pain in his hip had disappeared. It confused him further. He'd had that pain since, he paused his thoughts and stared blankly into space.

When he became aware of himself again, Madeleine was sitting across from him with a worried look on her face.

"James, you were dissociating," she told him.

For another week, this continued. James felt the loss of an important memory, and when he'd try to pinpoint that, and its connection to his now missing phantom pain, he'd dissociate.

Then, one afternoon, he and Madeleine were walking through the park near their flat and James saw a small woman with cropped white hair not far in front of them. He dropped Madeleine's hand and ran ahead.

But when he reached her, it wasn't whom he expected.

He apologized and sat on a bench. When Madeleine caught up with him, he simply told her, "She's gone."

All the years of those little phantom pains, the missing memory, they all connected in his mind finally. He'd recalled when he'd hacked Olivia's file years earlier finding it strange that she gave birth to her only child the same day he'd had his appendectomy.

Each day, James woke with that same empty feeling. There was a part of him that wanted to be angry. She had been alive and never told him. At the same time, there was a part of him that felt guilty because if he felt her small bits of pain, how much worse must it have been for her?

Madeleine didn't understand. She sat with him and worried each time he paused mid-conversation to stare and not return to her for some time. 

He called M, finally, and asked where she was really buried. Of course, he wanted to know how James had known Olivia was alive. But James couldn't give him an answer that made sense. 

When James arrived at the small cemetery in Surrey, M was waiting for him.

They stood at the grave and James saw that, indeed, the date of her death had been that morning he'd awoke and felt a part of himself missing.

He told M. What was the worst the man would do? Maybe he'd have James committed. At that point, James didn't care. That missing part seemed to be growing and he felt it might soon consume him.

M looked at him for a while before he spoke.

"I knew there was something," M told him. "I think she knew what it was."

James nodded.

She probably had, he thought. Especially at the end, she would have felt the bullets and his lingering pain. She'd known all that time he was alive, but she'd let him hide.

He wondered how different it might have been had he figured things out before she was gone. Because, with this knowledge, everything he'd done for her made sense. At the time, he'd simply thought himself loyal to Six. Now, though, he realized, it was her. 

Now, he thought, he would have gone with her. Anywhere she had been, he would have wanted to be there, had he known. 

The emptiness grew over the next few weeks. His bouts of dissociation grew longer. He slept more deeply and when he woke was more disoriented.

One night, before they turned out the light, James turned to Madeleine.

"I love you," he said. "But I love her more and I have to go to her."

Madeleine didn't have time to ask what James meant before he lay his head down on the pillow and was gone.

* * *

M listened as Madeleine told him what happened. 

They were standing in the hall outside the morgue. M only nodded.

"What did he mean?" Madeleine wanted to know.

M shrugged, but as he walked away, he pulled out his phone to call Tanner.

"See if that space next to Olivia's grave is available," he said.

Tanner didn't even question him. 

How was it, M wondered, that those who knew them always suspected, but that the two of them never did.

 


End file.
